Hi, I'm new here. I felt like this should be the right place for this, but if it needs moving to the new people subforum please do. I also feel a little embarrassed posting so soon after the guy in Oxford (I'm also in the UK but definitely didn't go to Oxford or make sensible decisions at his age). I'm in London, I'm 24 (F).
I have my student loans, which are 10,300 ($15,500). It's probably 10,000 round or slightly under once you deduct my student loan payments so far. They don't track this, you have to figure it out yourself, which I'm doing. Presumably so that you don't bother trying.
I have been saving to pay them off and have £12,400. I'm still doing the deducting part at the moment to work out exactly how much I need to pay back. I was already doing this before I found MMM, but MMM has been reassuring that I'm doing the right thing. I've been reading the blog posts and have read most of them, but I have NO previous financial knowledge and don't understand a lot of it yet. I've got a book on investing from the library that I've started.
One of my parents accidentally opened one of my bank statements so they know I have this money. They are not in favour of me paying back the loan, which they think is a waste of money at this age. I live with them, rent free, which is how I'm able to save at the moment. In May my mother had a cash crisis of £20,000 (c $30,000, more on that shortly) and I was afraid that she'd ask me to give her the money to help her pay it back.
That didn't happen, but what has happened is that they've offered to help me buy a house. I was immediately alarmed and just said I'd have to think about it, so no details were discussed. Presumably if I went through with the offer I would be expected to contribute the £10,000 to the deposit, and it would probably end up being a flat. I earn approximately just under £18,000 a year.
That's actually kind of irrelevant anyway because I absolutely don't want to do it. As I said I don't really know financially if I'm making the correct decision (I still not entirely sure I understand the MMM rent vs buy arguments* but I'm guessing they support not doing it?). The main reason I have for not doing it is that I don't trust my parents to not screw me over later. I think they probably do have the best intentions in making the offer now (and are certainly presenting the offer that way) but that these can only last so long.
Examples:
1) the £20,000 was a tax payback because my mother had been using a loophole that was closed; she was supposed to be retiring this year and now isn't for another 2 years to pay it back. I think my dad loaned her the money to physically pay it back.
2) it was my dad's idea for her to use the loophole in the first place and he set it up with his financial advisor because she doesn't know much about finances either; I distinctly remember conversations about how he would maybe use the loophole himself if it turned out to work for her in the long term. This has all magically been forgot, like a lot of things.
3) my dad has his own situation with his financial advisor and has been doing that for a long time, at least since my late teens. I disagree with a lot of what tax is spent on but I still think tax exists for a good reason. Both my mother and I work in the NHS.
4) When I started uni they said they would pay for all my student loans because they didn't want me to start life burdened by debt. Again, I think they believed that when they said it. I signed up to Student Finance England because they said it was the only way to take out the loan you needed to pay with and then when the letter arrived just handed it over like I should have known that was coming. If they hadn't spent the 3 years bragging to our other family that I didn't have loans because they were paying for it all, so all my cousins etc thought that too, I swear I would have thought I was schizophrenic.
I think it's understandable why I don't want to share a mortgage with them? but I feel like outright turning down the offer because 'I don't want to' will seriously offend them and make things extremely difficult for me. As I said, I don't know anything about how finances work so I want to present them with an argument that will hopefully make them back off, and I was hoping the people here could help with that.
I've also been doing some reading about housing now and it turns out that stamp duty on extra houses is going to go up in April, I would not be surprised if this influenced their decision to offer this now as they have known about my savings for a while.
I will be posting again as a case study, because I'm not happy with my job and prospects, and would like to move out once I have got my loan paid off, but that is for another post. Please ask any questions you need to ask. Please don't yell at me for having paid £10,000 for a degree that I literally do not need to do my job. I feel terrible about it constantly.
*for clarity of mind: the argument is that, if you pay £600 a month in rent for ten years you spend £72000 with no maintenance costs and if you had a house you would pay more over the same amount of time, plus repairs, you would sitll have the rest of the mortgage to pay, and the house would not necessarily be what it was worth when you got the mortgage for it and every house is going to depreciate some from being lived in. Is this right?